20 Coppers Bank of Chinan

The Bank of Chinan — Ji'nan Bank in pinyin — was a Communist Party financial institution established in 1939 to serve the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu border region, one of the main anti-Japanese base areas straddling parts of Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong, and Henan. Its notes were instruments of wartime economic administration as much as currency, deliberately circulated to displace both Japanese military scrip and the puppet regime's Federal Reserve Bank notes from occupied territories.

The 1941 copper-denomination issues occupied the low end of the guerrilla economy, used for small commodity transactions in rural markets where metallic coinage had largely vanished. S3073C is one of several fractional variants from that year, distinguished in the Pick listing by signature or color differences that can be subtle under poor light.